The notorious Casey Johnson, photographed at her home in Bel Air, California, on June 21, 2006. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Looking back on the whole affair now, Casey Johnson admits there was a moment when she could have just kept her mouth shut; when she could have “taken the high road.” She smiles, and glances at the crowd of ladies gathered for afternoon tea in the lounge of the Carlyle hotel, in New York. Yes, she could have said nothing when, she claims, the New York Post contacted her last March and read her those horrible e-mails. That would have been the way to avoid “really upsetting” her father, Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV, the press-shy philanthropist who bought the New York Jets in 2000 for $635 million—and publicly embarrassing her aunt and Woody’s sister, the heiress and socialite Elizabeth Ross “Libet” Johnson.

But given how angry Casey was at her aunt—how angry she had been for weeks—saying nothing would have required considerable restraint. And restraint is not a trait the 26-year-old heiress to the vast Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune puts much stock in, as anyone can see when she arrives at the Carlyle on this May afternoon teetering on six-inch Chanel heels, her glossy blond hair expertly coiffed, all five feet two inches of her poured into an orange houndstooth wool suit with a tulle petticoat fringe at the knees and a low-cut frilly white blouse. The ensemble is a creation of Fifi & Romeo, she explains, a design team better known for their “adorable” line of clothing for dogs. But even this is overshadowed by the diamonds: glittering solid hoops paired with marble-size studs in both ears, and diamond rings on every finger. The pièce de résistance, however, is the rivetingly enormous canary diamond, just a shade smaller than a golf ball, on her left hand. The ring, along with a Lusitano stallion, was a gift to herself for her birthday last September, she says as she orders an iced cappuccino, scones, and tea sandwiches, seemingly unaware that people are openly staring at her. Or maybe she is aware. The pillowy lips slathered in hot-pink lipstick, the diamonds, the Fifi & Romeo—the whole effect is, um ... “so Legally Blonde,” she says, laughing, although there is no mirth in her eyes, just a hint of defiance.

As Casey tells it, she suspected that something “unkosher” was going on between 38-year-old John Dee, the man she thought was her boyfriend, and her 56-year-old aunt, Libet Johnson, even before the three of them traveled to Cambodia in January to visit Sovann Komar, the orphanage that Libet had established in Phnom Penh in 2003. But, she says, “I had been going under the impression that I might be crazy.” That changed two months later, when, she says, she returned a message from “Page Six,” the gossip column of the New York Post, only to have the column’s editor, Richard Johnson, read her excerpts of e-mails from Libet to Dee. When she heard Libet’s intimate tone (“I know we met for a reason ... “) and heard herself described as “vindictive,” Casey says, she knew she wasn’t going nuts. Her first impulse was to hold her tongue. “I said I didn’t have a comment, and then I looked at my assistant and I said, ‘Goddammit, I have a comment,’ ” she says with a huge, dimpled smile, “and I went on my merry way and gave one.” Went on her merry way—“just unloaded,” as Richard Johnson recalls—and publicly accused Libet of seducing her boyfriend. “I think [my aunt] needs help,” Casey told the Post. “I feel sorry for her. She’s single. She’s been divorced umpteen times. She’s afraid to go out in public.” And then Casey delivered the coup de grâce: “She was sleeping with my boyfriend, who I was in love with,” she said. “An old woman with a lot of money is a very powerful aphrodisiac.”

The item appeared on March 29, and it did more than raise eyebrows. People were stunned. Horrified. Titillated. To see Libet Johnson’s name in the newspaper in itself was remarkable, but to see it in connection with something so personal, so unseemly, was unthinkable. Libet has never spoken about herself to the press, and she has forbidden her friends to do so. Only rarely have some of them dared to speak, in whispered tones, of her jaw-dropping wealth—her farm in Millbrook, New York, with its private heliport; her vast home in Vail; her 20,000-square-foot triplex in Manhattan’s Trump International Hotel and Tower, which was valued in 2001 at $62.3 million, although she has since reportedly sold pieces of it.

Married five times, Libet Johnson has also had a long string of boyfriends, among them the singer Michael Bolton and Jerome Jeandin, the chauffeur at the Ritz in Paris, who was given a Ferrari when Libet discarded him, sometime in the mid-1990s. More recently, she dated Frédéric Fekkai, the dashing society hairdresser who, like many of her boyfriends, was younger than she. Although there were rumors in 2001 that they would marry, Fekkai, now 47 and recently married to the fashion consultant Shirin von Wulffen, is reportedly one of the few men who dumped her. “She was devastated,” Casey says of her aunt.

But however much people might snicker at her romantic escapades, within New York society Libet is seen as someone who is not to be trifled with. Fun and spirited, she is an heiress with impeccable, old-school manners. Which is why many saw Casey’s “Page Six” broadside as a vulgar and unforgivable breach of etiquette by a young woman whose public feuds and wild partying over the years with a posse of equally ill-mannered friends—Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan, Bijou Phillips—have made her a poster girl for everything that’s wrong with the young and rich today. Among the older guard of society, Casey is described as “petulant,” “insufferable,” and “uninteresting, with the attention span of a dead fly”—in short, as “the dreadful Casey Johnson,” to quote one of Libet’s acquaintances.

On Libet’s side, there are those who say that John Dee showed good taste by picking, in the words of another acquaintance, the “spunkier, more natural” of the two Johnson heiresses: “[Libet] obviously has more money than her niece, so why would he not switch?” Others took note of Dee’s denial to “Page Six” that he had ever been Casey’s boyfriend—“it’s absolutely crazy and incredibly sad” were his precise words. All this triggered the question: did Casey make the whole thing up, even give the e-mails to the New York Post, in a desperate bid for attention?

“Are you kidding me?” says Casey when asked if this is true. “I was, like, floored. When I read those, I was as shocked as everybody else.” She insists that there is no way she could have gotten hold of Libet’s e-mail correspondence with anyone, including Dee. And there are plenty of people in this Edith-Wharton-on-steroids saga who stand behind her—not just Casey’s younger, jet-set friends, but old-line socialites as well. Some say that Libet finally met her match when she crossed her niece, a young woman not quite as rich but equally spoiled, willful, and accustomed to buying everything she wants. Indeed, people felt that they were watching more than just a delicious feud inside one of America’s richest families; it was a changing of the guard, in which a generation steeped in decorum and jealously guarded privacy was giving way to a tougher breed, one given to using obnoxious exhibitionism, louche MySpace offerings, and bad press as social weapons. It began to seem, as friends of Libet’s called Casey to offer sympathy, that in the battle of the Johnson heiresses the younger might be the more formidable. A loner who is in some ways as private as her aunt but much edgier—a Paris Hilton with brains—Casey Johnson “is not at all the way she appears in the press as just this party hound,” says the socialite Susan Gutfreund. “There is a lot more to Casey than that.”

Set behind gates, Casey’s house in Bel Air is a two-story Spanish-style mansion, half hidden by a lush jungle of bougainvillea, lavender, and pine trees. It is mid-June when I pull up in her cobblestone courtyard, for our second meeting. Casey’s Range Rover is parked out front, and it is her assistant who greets me. “Watch your step,” she cautions as I nearly trip over the large dog bed outside the front door. It belongs to Ollie, a two-year-old German shepherd—one of Casey’s four dogs. Inside I am met by Zoe, Casey’s 11-year-old teacup poodle, who growls at me menacingly. “She’s my baby,” Casey says.

As she leads me on a tour of the house—past Buddhas surrounded by incense candles; the bedroom, with its wall-to-wall tiger-print carpet; her sunlit office, with an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe hanging on the wall—I can tell from the pee pads scattered everywhere that none of the dogs is fully housebroken, or, as Casey puts it, “They all have their moments.” Last fall, Casey’s baby Chihuahua, Tukus, had diarrhea and soiled the floors in her suite at the Plaza Athénée, in Manhattan. Her father paid around $20,000 for damages, but he insisted that Casey put an end to such charges by renting an apartment—which she did, at Madison Avenue and 67th Street. The diarrhea incident was somewhat more costly than the one a few years ago, when her father rented a yacht for a family trip, and the Johnson dogs used the carpets as their bathrooms. Of the Johnson family on vacation, Casey says, “Worse than Puff Daddy.”

Standing in her huge marble-floored foyer, Casey asks if I want to see her photo album from Cambodia. We settle on a couch in the larger of her two living rooms, next to an ornate fireplace, and, with Zoe curled up next to her, Casey lights a cigarette. In leggings and a gauzy silk tunic, wearing no makeup and only one diamond ring, she is far more at ease than she was at the Carlyle. She speaks softly as she shows me the photographs—dinner with the former Cambodian ambassador to the U.S. at a table set with hundreds of lilies; Casey with one of the armed bodyguards Libet hired to protect their group; the socialite Anne Bass; Casey and Libet, in jeans and T-shirts, their arms around each other.

And then there are the darker images—photos from Casey’s visit to Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge torture house that has been converted to a genocide museum, showing corpses piled on top of one another and faces of the victims just before they were executed. Libet had also organized a visit to the Phnom Penh dump, a 100-acre expanse of steaming, rotting garbage that is scavenged by thousands of destitute Cambodians. One photograph shows Casey, wearing army-fatigue pants and a camouflage cap, standing in the garbage with a group of small children and staring at the camera with a stricken expression. “Anne Bass said, ‘Libet, why would you take people to the dump? It’s so awful,’ ” Casey says, lighting another cigarette. “But I’m glad we went. The poverty and devastation in Cambodia is so unreal. I came back with a totally new outlook on life. These people are getting three dollars a day, and I’m like, ‘Why can’t I get the latest Chanel bag? It’s sold out.’ I have my health, you know. I have my family. I haven’t been sold into prostitution. I live in a free country. And I have so much more than I need.” She rolls her eyes, as if to acknowledge the screaming understatement of that last remark, given what she has just shown me—the room-size closet filled with racks of couture clothing, the guest bedroom where more than 100 pairs of Chanels, Manolo Blahniks, and Christian Louboutins are arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Growing up rich “has its good side,” Casey admits, but ever since the trip to Cambodia it seems that another side has emerged—“that side when reality kicks in and you’re 26 years old and you don’t get whatever you want.”

Best known for dressing the world’s wounds with Band-Aids, Johnson & Johnson was founded by Robert Wood Johnson—great-grandfather of Libet and great-great-grandfather of Casey—and his brothers, James and Edward, in 1887. But it was Libet’s grandfather, Robert Wood junior, also known as the General, who built it into the $171.5 billion pharmaceutical empire it is today. A tyrant who by all accounts deserved his nickname, the General heaped abuse on his only son and namesake, Libet’s father, eventually expelling him from the family company in 1965. Humiliated and weakened by alcoholism, Libet’s father died of cancer just five years later, at age 50.

Next to Casey, the best-known Johnson of her generation is Jamie, whose documentary Born Rich probed the psyches of the young and set-for-life. Jamie comes from the scandalous side of the family—the one descended from the General’s brother, Seward, whose marriage to his Polish chambermaid, Barbara “Basia” Piasecka, sparked an embarrassing three-year inheritance battle. That was in addition to an attempted bombing and a shooting. Libet and Casey’s side, by contrast, has a more straightforwardly tragic cast. In 1975, two of Libet’s brothers died—Billy in a motorcycle crash, Keith of a drug overdose. Their inheritance passed to Libet and her other two brothers, Woody and Christopher, making them equally—and exceedingly—rich.

In 1979, Woody married Nancy Sale Frey, a former model from St. Louis. The oldest of Woody and Sale’s three daughters, Casey was born in Florida, but when she was three years old the family moved into a magnificent five-bedroom apartment at Fifth Avenue and 64th Street, in Manhattan. There were nannies and butlers and a chef who prepared separate meals for Casey and her sisters, Jamie, now 24, and Daisy, 19. Casey got her first Chanel bag when she was 10, her first pair of handmade snakeskin pumps when she was 11. “I got whatever I wanted,” she says. “I got a car when I was 16. I didn’t even have a driver’s license.” Still, Casey’s childhood, like that of her aunt, was not an altogether happy one. She had health problems, which isolated her. There was a lot of “frustration and pain,” says Susan Gutfreund, and that made her mature beyond her years. “Almost too mature,” says her friend the publicist Lizzie Grubman.

Casey went to the Chapin School, the tony Manhattan private school, then to Marymount, a Catholic girls’ school, and finally to high school with Paris Hilton at Dwight. Hilton never graduated from the school known to some New York preppies as Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together, but Casey did, and she went on to Brown University. She missed New York, though, and, more important, the college would not allow her poodle, Zoe, to live in the dorm with her, so Casey dropped out her freshman year. After that, between parties, she tried her hand at working. She taught singing to children at Dwight, interned at Grubman’s P.R. firm, and, in 2001, got a job as the beauty editor for the fashion-and-celebrity magazine Manhattan File. She says she “loved” working. It was “great to have someplace to be where you’re needed,” despite the “measly paychecks.” But after Manhattan File folded, in late 2001, Casey decided to move to Los Angeles. She bought a $3.2 million house in Beverly Hills and settled into a life that, she says, was “more laid-back” than the one she led in New York.

“My entire personality changes when I’m in L.A.,” says Casey, who moved to Bel Air after the house in Beverly Hills was burglarized in 2004. In New York, she had suffered from bouts of depression, but the sun in L.A. has gone a long way toward curing that, she says. Another reason she loves L.A. is that “out here no one knows who I am and no one cares. They don’t care about people from moneyed families, they have celebrities,” and so, in L.A., “I’m not like, Oh my God, is my makeup done by Gucci Westman?” She says that “Page Six,” in particular, made living in New York unbearable: “I moved out here partly because there was this blurb that said Casey Johnson was showing off her thong, and I thought, If they are writing about my goddamn fucking thong when I am going to get coffee at eight in the morning across the street from where I live, I need to fucking move,” she says. “ ‘Page Six’ loves to pick on people. And a lot of it is bullshit.… I think Richard Johnson is disgusting and what they do is disgusting. They will write about you without even calling you to ask if this is true.” Which Richard Johnson says is “bullshit. We certainly called her for comment on many occasions and she’s certainly gotten her side of the story out there.”

As for the paparazzi, Casey says, “they are so rude and disrespectful.” She recalls a run-in last summer in Saint-Tropez with a horde of photographers who spotted her and Paris Hilton as they were returning to the yacht of Hilton’s then fiancé, Paris Latsis, after a day of shopping. When they saw the cameras, the young women started running, with the paparazzi in hot pursuit. “Literally,” she says, “the photographers pushed us into the ocean, with our shopping bags over our heads. I think Paris loves the attention, but I could not stand it.”

Nevertheless, says Casey, “the stupidest mistake of my life” was to turn down Hilton’s invitation to be her co-star on The Simple Life. Nicole Richie—Paris’s third choice, some say, after her sister, Nicky, and Casey—got the job instead and has parlayed it into a promising career. Casey’s “dream” was to be an actress, but a serious one. “I kick myself in the butt every day,” she says of the lost opportunity to jump-start an acting career that so far has consisted of a minor role in the little-seen Sharon Stone vehicle Gloria; a leading role in It Girls, a 2002 documentary about the lives of rich young Manhattanites; and a part in the never-aired Women’s Entertainment comedy series The Tinsley Bumble Show, in which Casey played a bitchy, vindictive socialite named Mimi von Lustig.

There are those who say that Casey was simply playing herself in the series; that in the posse of “jealous, mean” rich girls Casey travels with she can be the scariest. “She will do really mean things,” says one former friend, “like crank-call you.” And send “the meanest e-mails to people—that she hates them, they’re ugly, fat, pathetic white trash,” a claim that Casey says in an e-mail “is so ridiculous and untrue.” This friend adds that Casey “can be really sweet and generous,” but when she feels betrayed, things around her can get rough. It was Casey’s nasty comment in 2002 to her former boyfriend the Calumet Farm heir Stephen de Kwiatkowski—“Why don’t you start dating someone who is past puberty?”—that sparked a brawl at Bungalow 8 in which Nicole Richie accidentally cut his face with a broken glass. And it was a feud with the onetime Playboy Playmate Nicole Lenz, whom Casey accused of having taken part in the burglary of her home, that triggered the mêlée at a 2004 MTV party at Xes, in L.A., during which Casey allegedly cheered on Bijou Phillips as she “bitch-slapped” and punched Lenz— an incident that resulted in lawsuits and countersuits.

Casey insists she has never played a central role in her crowd’s public catfights and endless feuds, which have become the bread and butter of TV and newspaper gossips. “I’ve actually never cut anyone,” she says. “I’ve never punched anyone, or thrown anything, or hit anyone.” She pauses. “Drama seems to kind of surround me.” She professes not to remember an episode in May, reported on “Page Six,” when her former friend Bijou Phillips shouted “Ugly bitch!” in her face before locking a party staffer in the bathroom because she believed he’d invited Casey to the event, which was hosted by Phillips’s boyfriend. “There is a lot of feuding going on around me,” Casey says—between Hilton and Lohan, and between Hilton and Richie—“but I am not in a feud with anyone.”

But, Casey later adds, “if someone crosses my path, they better be ready for pure hell, because nobody gets by me.” We’re having lunch on the patio of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and what’s occasioned this outburst is a threat by a former assistant to sell information about Casey to the press. “She is making a big mistake. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I have [O. J. Simpson defense attorney] Bob Shapiro as my lawyer, and it’s, like, ‘Hey, little bitch, don’t do that. Don’t play with fire.’ ” As she says this, Casey remains remarkably calm, languidly smoking her Marlboro 27 in the shadow of a palm tree. Then the gazpacho arrives, and the talk turns to Karma. For the last eight months she’s been working with a spiritual healer. “She taught me a lot when I was going through that whole John Dee–Libet thing. She said, ‘[Your aunt] is in so much pain already, you don’t have to lift a finger.’ And I thought, You know, you’re right. Who would want to do that? You must be really miserable to do that. So, instead of me suing her, or crank-calling her, or ruining her life, Karma is going to get her.”

Casey says she met John Dee on a blind date, sometime in late 2004. Tall, stocky, with dark hair and a perpetual five-o’clock shadow, he was, she says, “very, very charismatic, and so funny.” A music manager whose acts include the neo-soul singer Maxwell and the thrash-metal band Megadeth, Dee had been married to the actress Lara Flynn Boyle for a very brief period in the 1990s, but he was not as wealthy as some of the women he attracted. “Struggling” is how Casey characterizes him. “Penniless,” says another heiress who knows Dee. “He didn’t even have a trust fund.” But he had a way with women. “He was very intense,” says a former object of his interest, “sort of dangerous, but not my type. He was so obvious.”

After several months of being “just friends,” Casey says, she and Dee became serious shortly before the party she threw herself for her 26th birthday at her parents’ home on September 24 of last year. Her whole family showed up—including her Aunt Libet. Dee and Libet “clicked right away,” Casey recalls. “Libet called me the next day and said, ‘Oh my God, John is so handsome. You should go out with him.” During the next three months, Casey says, Libet and Dee had lunch together a number of times. Casey says she thought it was “odd,” but she didn’t become suspicious until plans for the trip to Cambodia got under way and “Libet said, ‘Do you want a separate room?’ We were fully going out, and I thought that was so odd. I think she didn’t want us sharing a room.” Still, the trip went smoothly. It was only later that Casey and Libet had their first confrontation.

During their time in Cambodia, they had spent several days at Sovann Komar, the spectacular orphanage Libet had built on the banks of the Mekong River. The complex, which cost a reported $10 to $15 million, has a nursery school and group homes, where 55 abandoned children are housed with foster parents in family-like settings. It was there that Casey met Lavissa, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl who, she says, had been found on the street in Phnom Penh. Casey fell “totally in love.”

After returning to Los Angeles and “giving it a lot of thought,” Casey says, she finally called Libet and asked for permission to adopt Lavissa. In 2003, according to a press report, Libet and her off-again, on-again boyfriend Dr. Lionel Bissoon had brought to the United States a young Cambodian boy, William, who Casey says is still in Libet’s care. So Casey was stunned—and devastated—when Libet refused to let her have Lavissa. “You know when you cry so hard that you can’t speak? I was just ... ” Casey’s voice trails off. “I have Lavissa’s picture in my car. I look at her every day.” Although Casey took this rejection personally, Libet writes in a statement to Vanity Fair: “We are not an adoption agency; according to the parameters established in our agreement with the Cambodian government, the children in our care must remain in country and be raised by Cambodian parents.”

It was on February 12, shortly after Libet refused her request, Casey says, that she broke up with Dee. “He was all about work, and I was all about wanting to spend time with him. I want to be with someone who is doing well, not starting a business, because I want attention. All attention on me,” she says with a laugh. Besides, he wasn’t affectionate. “He was living with me, but he always kept his things in his suitcase,” she says. Money was also an issue. “It’s already enough that my dad owns the Jets, and that my great-great-grandfather started Johnson & Johnson,” she says. “But to add on top of that that I have my own money—to a normal guy, that’s a threatening thing. So people would think it’s a blessing, but in terms of meeting the right guy, it’s not, let me tell you.… Unless they’re a gold digger or something, I think the man is going to feel a bit insecure.” And as Casey makes clear, insecurity is not what she thinks Dee’s issue was. “He used me,” she says. “He liked the life. Taking the helicopter to the Gulfstream IV to go to Jets games, Jet Skiing with my dad.”

When she ended the relationship with Dee, Casey says, she had no idea about the e-mails between Dee and her aunt, whose message to him on February 3, as published on “Page Six,” read, “I am so happy that we have become friends. I admire you so much. Your zest for life and passion for everything you do is infectious. I know we met for a reason Love, Libet.” Shortly after the breakup, however, Casey phoned Libet to complain about her ongoing friendship with Dee: “I told her to stop seeing him and she refused. That’s when I assumed something was going on.” Later, she would learn that Libet had e-mailed Dee after getting off the phone with Casey. “All is well with me,” Libet wrote. “But I got a very, unhappy phone call from Casey, telling me that, ‘if I ever talked to you (or your Mother) again, she would never speak to me again.’ And then she went down the litany of your crimes She is very vindictive Let’s let the storm die down a little. She’ll buy another dog and move on, I’m sure. Best, Libet.” Unaware of this, Casey e-mailed her aunt on February 19. In the subject line she wrote, “I’m sure u r sleeping with him.” Libet wrote back that day: “I know you know in your heart that those things you just wrote me are untrue. I really don’t know why you want to lash out at me, when I have done nothing to hurt you.… Please leave me out of your problems.”

Angry as she was at her aunt, what hurt Casey most, she says, was Dee’s denial to “Page Six” that he had ever been her boyfriend. That and his admission that he had given Libet a necklace. According to a friend, he continues to deny that he went out with Casey—although people often saw them together. So, unless one of them is lying, it seems likely that Dee and Casey had very different interpretations of their relationship. In any case, says a friend of Casey’s, she’s better off without him: “I mean, John Dee?” says this friend. “You’d think they could do better. Libet and Casey are both gorgeous and they both have money. It’s just, like, bad taste in guys.

But who gave the e-mails to “Page Six”? Richard Johnson will not say, but Casey has her suspicions. The New York Post identified Dee as a grandson of the noted music producer and talent scout John Hammond and as a cousin of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. In fact, Cooper and Hammond are relatives of Dee’s stepfather, and Casey believes that this genealogical upgrade suggests that Dee supplied the e-mails to the column, “to promote himself.” But if he shared Libet’s private correspondence with “Page Six,” that would have ensured the end of their friendship—unless it had already ended. Dee did not return phone calls from Vanity Fair. In an e-mail, Libet Johnson’s attorney said that she “categorically denied the innuendos and allegations set forth in the page 6 story,” calling them “untrue and unfortunate.” As for Casey, the last she heard, in mid-July, Libet and Dee were still in touch with each other, although, after lashing out at her aunt in public, Casey now says she is not entirely sure that their relationship was ever sexual.

No one outside the Johnson-Dee-Johnson triangle knows exactly what happened. But Susan Gutfreund feels that Libet, “being older and wiser, shall we say,” was wrong to “be in any way involved with anyone Casey’s involved with. It’s a bad call, to put herself in that position.” Still, says Gutfreund, the whole experience may end up being good for Casey: “I think she is really in a stage now where this will all evolve for her and turn her life around in a different way.”

Indeed, it was shortly after getting back from Cambodia that Casey, who already actively supports her father’s Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, decided to devote more of her time to fund-raising for children’s charities. She has chosen two—the sherp Orphanage, in Kenya, and the Malawi Project, a group that Madonna helped establish to support children who have lost their families to aids. Casey says the work has helped give her focus. “It’s so boring to do nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried it. It’s, like, how many days a week can you actually go shopping? You get burned out. And you feel like shit. You think, What have I ever done to alter this world? What will people say? ‘Oh, she had a lot of shoes’?”

Casey isn’t speaking to her aunt, and says she probably never will. But she is grateful to Libet for making her realize how much she wanted to adopt a child. And in March, she threw herself into the daunting process of applying to adopt a baby girl from Kazakhstan. She’s already collected doctors’ certificates and recommendations—14 instead of the required 2, “just to be sure”—and baby-proofed the house in Bel Air. Nicky Hilton has already signed up—literally, since Casey insisted she sign a notarized document—to be the baby’s godmother. And Nicky’s mother, Kathy, is already planning a baby shower.

Casey’s parents have been divorced for five years, and when she told them that if all goes well she will be bringing home a baby by the end of the year, they had very different reactions. Sale—who is dating TV host and former Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Ahmad Rashad and has started a new career as a music manager—thought “it was a great idea,” Casey says. “She thinks adoption is the best thing to do.” Casey’s 59-year-old father, Woody—whose girlfriend, Suzanne Ircha, gave birth to his first son, Robert Wood Johnson V, in March—told her he thought she should wait until she was older. “But, you know, I don’t think I asked him for his opinion,” Casey says. “The only opinion that matters is mine, and I have no doubts about this.”

Susan Gutfreund is decidedly in favor of the adoption: “Casey has a lot of love to give, and I think she will be a great mother. I know other people might see this as ‘Oh, Casey had to have the Chanel purse at 10 years old. Well, now Casey’s decided the thing to do is have a child.’ I don’t see this. Casey has put a lot of thought into this. I think [Cambodia] was a coup de foudre that awakened something in her.” As for Casey’s other friends, some worry that motherhood will make it harder for her to find a man. Which, after what she’s been through, really makes her laugh: “I’m finding a really good guy,” she says. “He’ll have to love me and my child.”

Casey has already picked out the baby’s name: Ava-Monroe, after Marilyn, who has long been her idol. “I see a lot of similarities between us,” Casey says. “Her life makes me sad. I don’t think she was very happy. She was just very, very complicated and sort of a deep person, and nobody realized that. They thought she was some dumb blonde, and she wasn’t. She was a smart, smart broad. And I think that sometimes people look at me and think, Oh, Casey Johnson, she’s stupid, she’s blonde, she’s an heiress, blah, blah, blah.”

There’s a hint of melancholy in her eyes, and I ask if she’s feeling well. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m just a little tired.” Back in New York a few days later, though, I get a call from Casey. She’s cheerful now, excited, and she’s been shopping again. “I got a crib, and a changing table, and I got a car seat, and a stroller,” she says. And something for Ava-Monroe she just couldn’t resist: “the cutest leopard baby bikini. Oh my gosh. She is going to be dressed to kill.”